From Viewers Like You...

About two months ago, a viewer of the podcast that Ryan co-hosts on the This Week in Tech network, This Week in Computer Hardware, wrote in with some information that immediately excited the staff here at PC Perspective. Ryan for a long time has been of the opinion that the proliferation of 1080p displays, and prohibitive cost of high resolution monitors has been holding the industry back as a whole. With talk of 4K displays being introduced for consumers this year, a major topic on the podcast in the weeks prior to this viewer email had centered around why we haven't seen affordable 2560x1440 (or 2560x1600) displays.

This brings us back to the knowledge which the listener Jeremy bestowed upon us. Jeremy brought to our attention that various eBay sellers were reselling and exporting generic 27", IPS, LED backlight, 2560x1440 monitors from South Korea. What is remarkable about these displays however is that various models can be found for just around, or even under $350. Everyone listening, including Ryan and his co-host Patrick Norton became immediately interested in these monitors, and I went into research mode.

Well, late last week I decided that it was time I get out of the 1080p era, and into the world of higher resolution displays.

After an impressive shipment time of only 3 days, I recieved a package directly from Seoul this afternoon, and rushed straight to the office to open it and inform PC Perspective readers.

For those of you not in the know, we recieved a tip a few weeks back from a reader about inexpensive 2560x1440 displays popping up on eBay for around $350. Of course this excited the staff at PC Perspective, and we immediately went into research mode, looking for all of the information we could find about these displays. While the initial impressions we saw all over forums were generally positive, we decided to give these displays the real PC Perpsective review treatment.

While the Yamakasi Catleap is the most well known of these monitors, I decided to go with the $315 (Shipped!) Achieva Shiminan, for reasons to be expanded upon later in the full review.

However, before we began our strenuous testing process, I wanted to give the dedicated PC Per readers a sneak peak of such an interesting product. Out of the box, we hooked it up an AMD Radeon 7950 on our GPU testbed, which had no issues at all.

Also, just because the poorly translated eBay listings said it would not work, despite our best inclinations, I plugged this display into my Late 2011 MacBook Air with Intel HD 3000 graphics. Even using the not so reliable Apple Mini DisplayPort to Dual Link DVI adapter, my MacBook detected the display with no issue. While I certainly won't be gaming on this machine, the display has been working flawlessly so far.

I know readers must have a million questions about these displays, so feel free to leave them in the comments of this post, and I will try to address them all in the full review coming soon!